This book is three times too long. You simply cannot put this many weird ideas into a book.

The story opens with our hero, Manfred Manx, who's a patent troll -- but a good one -- perhaps we might call him a patent elf, not like Santa's helpers so much as the sword-wielding immortal kind of elf, not that he has a sword or any weapons really...but he does end up immortal.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

Unfortunately, Manfred is dating one of the IRS's top auditors in an era when bounty hunting for the IRS is somewhat like being a pirate bearing letters of marque from the king and the IRS feels that Manfred is not giving them their due with his patent generosity. Also, she (the auditor-girlfriend) is very much a dominatrix. There's a scene where she makes Manfred get her pregnant against his will that I won't soon forget. Apparently the future holds many marvelous wonders.

Some political thing was going on in the background that quite honestly I wasn't able to follow. The lobster-intelligences from the old soviet union were too distracting. But I would have been fine just reading about Manfred's adventures as he gallivanted around the globe flinging patents this way and that and outsmarting everyone. It's terribly fun.

By the time we get to Manfred's daughter and her attempt to escape from the legal control of her mother by enslaving herself to a asteroid mining corporation (which she herself owns through a trust fund), I was going to put the book down and move on -- but then there's this whole thing where mom (the dominatrix) converts to a feminist sect of sharia Islam because it allows her to claim the daughter's business as her own legal property and the daughter's only recourse is to declare herself the monarch of one of Saturn's moons.

"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully adn chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and --" She shrugs helplessly.

Surprisingly, it all works out for the daughter...until they discover the aliens. But the thing with these aliens is that they aren't there. And that's where Stross presents his solution to the Fermi paradox:

"I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth -- trying to migrate thorugh one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are -- and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they coudln't take enough computronium along."

Okay. So a few things here: Stross comes up with this idea that once intelligent species figure out how to upload their intelligences into computers, such beings will turn everything into computers to achieve maximum life support (computation). To do this they dismantle everything in the solar system save the star and build a Matrioshka brain:

"Take all the planets in the star system and dismantle them," she explains. "Turn them into dust -- structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing, and they're all running uploads -- Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain."

One you get intelligent beings living in things like this, Stross guesses they won't want to go very far from the home base because the bandwidth simply won't support all the thinking they do. And so the superintelligences of the galaxy haven't made contact with us because they simply don't want to get too far away from their wifi.

But, that doesn't stop the intrepid daughter, now queen of that moon around Saturn, from forking her personality and sending one of her forks on a mission into a galactic router. Unfortunately, instead of a superintelligence, they encounter "a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form" which almost traps them forever, but from which they make a neat escape with the help of Manfred Manx's heavily surgically modified and hyper-intelligent cat.

And this doesn't even begin to touch on the third part of this too long book. It has a happy ending though, so perhaps you will want to check it out. You can download it free here.